The investment bank Morgan Stanley has drawn up a precise estimate of the cost of cooling an Oberon server comprising 72 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Clearly, cooling alone is a small price to pay: no less than $50000 according to the bank’s estimates! Yes, we’re in a different business!
$50000 to watercool an Oberon server with 72 Blackell GPUs!
Clearly, Blackwell GPUs for AI applications consume a lot of power and heat up the system. In GPU terms alone, a server with 72 chips represents over 100,000W of power consumption… And that’s not counting the power consumption of the 32 Grace processors. A single drawer consumes 6600W, i.e. 6200W to dissipate. In short, it’s easy to see why air cooling is de facto out of the question. In addition to the GPUs and CPUs to be cooled, there’s the whole switching part to add to the bill.
In short, in terms of cost, it’s estimated that a tray alone costs $2260, or around $40680 for the whole server… Finally, for the processing part. If we add the switching part, we reach a total of $9180, or $1020 per drawer. In short, if we add it all up, we’re looking at $49860 in total, a pretty hefty sum. What weighs most heavily in the operation are the high-performance cold plates, which cost several hundred dollars each.
Interestingly, Morgan Stanley also estimates the future cooling costs of Vera Rubin. The latter will cost 17% more, as the GPUs will consume even more energy, as will the switching part, whose performance, power consumption and heating will increase. The estimated cost? $55710 for watercooling alone.
Despite significant progress in performance, cooling requirements are more pronounced, as we can see.
